


A House by the Sea

by maplemood



Category: Ghost Quartet - Malloy
Genre: Gen, Sister-Sister Relationship, Storytelling, ambiguous timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2020-11-26 04:47:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20924408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: "Let me tell you a story,” says Pearl in a voice that isn’t quite her voice, a voice that doesn’t scare her and doesn’t reassure her, either.





	A House by the Sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Synergic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Synergic/gifts).

Pearl White is snow-white, and Rose Red is blood-red, and they live together in a house by the sea. Not often anymore—not that often, still often enough—Pearl wakes up in the middle of the night to Rose staring down at her.

_ “God. _ Stop scaring me like that.”

“Hold me,” her sister demands.

“What’s the matter?” A chill prickles along Pearl’s spine. “You had another nightmare?”

Rose clambers into her bed, slithers under the covers. “Hold me tight,” she whispers, cold and moist like she’s been wading in the ocean, dunked in face-first. One damp cheek presses stickily to Pearl’s.

“Okay.” Pearl holds her tight. “Settle down, okay?” She smooths Rose’s tangled hair. “I’ll tell you a story. Let me tell you a story,” says Pearl in a voice that isn’t quite her voice, a voice that doesn’t scare her and doesn’t reassure her, either._ I don’t even know how to begin. _

_ So? Tell me a story. _

_ Tell us a story, and this terrible night will pass. _

* * *

There were two sisters who lived by the sea. Pearl tells their story.

There was a bear who lived in a cave. Pearl tells his story.

There was a girl on a subway platform, a man on a subway platform, two girls on a subway platform—Pearl tells their stories.

There was a girl who told stories to a wicked king every night in order to save her sister. Pearl has no idea how she never got tired, never got a sore throat or a dry mouth, never even thought about leaving the sister to fend for herself. She has no idea why it’s always one sister who tells the stories so the other one can...who knows what the other sister does? Who knows where she goes?

Pearl has no idea why, in stories, two can’t remain one. Not forever. Not even for very long. 

* * *

Rose is blood-red. Red hair whipping, pink cheeks flushed red in the cold wind blowing off the ocean, she dives into the waves and surfaces laughing and spluttering, screeching for Pearl over the breakers.

“No way,” Pearl shouts back. “I’m not stupid.” She wriggles her toes in the gritty, snow-white foam laced across the tide line; she’s too bony, Pearl thinks, too thin-skinned for the cold water and too skinny to be sure she won’t be swept out and dragged down all the way to the bottom.

“I’d catch you,” Rose says after she’s let the waves tumble her back to shore. “I wouldn’t let you sink. Anyway—” She wrings her dripping hair out “—the sharks wouldn’t want you. What’s there to eat?”

A minute later, Pearl trips over a bone half-buried in the sand.

It’s a breastbone. Maybe. Oval-wedge-shaped, knobbed at the top, and worn smooth and cool like sea glass. Pearl turns it over in her hands, brushes off the sand. 

Rose wrinkles her nose. “Creepy.”

“Mmm. I like it.” The bone feels thinner than a dinner plate. Like something you could lacquer, stretch strings across. Something you could set up on your mantelpiece, and Pearl decides she’ll do just that.

* * *

“Was it a nightmare?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I dreamed I pushed you into a river to drown, and you floated until all that was left were your bones, and they floated into a pond and a man fished them out and he left you on the bank, and another man took—he took your breastbone, Pearl, he made it into a fiddle, and then he took some of your hair and he strung his bow with it—”

“What the _ fuck _, Rose—”

“—and I wanted you to drown. I wanted you to die so much. I_ hated_ you—”

“Rose. It was just a story.”

“I know! I know. Tell me another one.”

“I’m not telling you that one again.”

“Why? It’s just a story.”

* * *

There was a family who lived together in a huge, dark, dank house. The kind of house that comes with its own mausoleum and its own ghosts. Living together drove most of that family crazy; most of them died by the end, and Pearl tells their story, too, just not as much as she tells the others.

She doesn’t think you need a mausoleum to hear ghosts, or at least to hear ghost stories. And Rose drives Pearl crazy enough. They drive each other crazy, usually when they don’t mean to and then again sometimes when they do.

Pearl uses the breastbone as a paperweight whenever she’s trying to write down her stories, which she tries less and less these days. The words don’t flow together like they do when she tells them, and trying isn’t any fun when Rose can rattle off a couple poems just like that, like it’s nothing. She writes them on rice paper in pretty, pearly cursive and sketches drooping lilies in the margins; Pearl scribbles her stories on butcher’s paper, already torn and smudged.

It drives her crazy, that Rose can make something so pretty without really thinking about it.

“I think all the time,” Rose snaps if she brings it up. “I think too much.”

“That’s not the point!” Pearl can’t explain what the point really is, that the truth isn’t the point, that in stories there’s always one sister who goes and one who stays, one who lives the stories and one who tells them, and also that poems written on rice paper with flowers in the margins get framed, get _ published _ in journals and leather bound books, and stories scribbled on butcher’s paper don’t.

“Those are our stories,” says Rose. “Nobody else’s.”

“They’re mine,” says Pearl. “I told them to you.”

“Right. And you also told me they weren’t anything special, remember?”

* * *

Everybody makes storytellers out to be so important, but they’re not really, Pearl knows. The storyteller is never the point of the story.

* * *

She’s holding Rose tight, they’re crammed into Pearl’s bed together, and Rose is staring at the breastbone-paperweight where it sits on the mantelpiece with the all the driftwood and sea glass Pearl’s collected while she waits for Rose at the tide line. Curled around Rose, stroking through her damp hair, Pearl knows she’s staring at the breastbone. Pearl’s staring at it, too.

“You ever get the feeling,” Rose murmurs finally, half-asleep, clammy and cold, “that all this happened before?”

_ Sure, _ Pearl could answer, except Rose isn’t talking about squashing into bed together or waking up spooked in the middle of the night. Rose is talking about the stories, about something deeper and darker than the stories. 

Pearl’s stories. 

_ Sure, _ she could answer; she could tell Rose that you don’t need a mausoleum to hear ghosts, that she’s always been afraid, stupidly afraid, of drowning; Pearl could tell Rose, again, the story of the girl who saved her sister through the telling of stories; she could, but the storyteller is never the point of the story. 

“They’re all made up,” she whispers. “They’re just stories, Rose.” 

“I don’t think so.” But Rose reaches up, her fingers lacing through Pearl’s. 

Pearl squeezes them, squeezes Rose, the bones of her. “I’ll tell you another one,” she says. “Just one more, all right?”

“All right.” Outside the dune grass rustles like old sheets; the breastbone on the mantelpiece shines ghostly-white. 

Pearl clears her throat. _ I don’t even know how to begin. _“There were two sisters who lived by the sea,” she begins, “and they were the same as anyone else….”

**Author's Note:**

> Like you, my big soft spot is for the girls of _Ghost Quartet_, and this time listening I was really interested in/inspired by the Pearl White/Scheherazade and Rose Red/Dunyazad parallels, plus the idea that in another version of the story (or maybe the same story), the sisters might get a chance to try again. Anyway, thank you so much for giving me the chance to write in this fandom, and I hope you have a happy Halloween!


End file.
